DIP11: Automatic downloading of libraries

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-06-19 20:41, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Jacob Carlborg"<doob at me.com>  wrote in message
> news:itko61$1qdm$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> On 2011-06-18 21:35, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>
>>> I'd probably consider something more like:
>>>
>>> orb.ver = "1.0.0";
>>> orb.author = "Jacob Carlborg";
>>> orb.type = Type.library;
>>> orb.imports = ["a.d", "b.di"]; // an array of import files
>>
>> That would be doable in Ruby as well. I though it would be better to not
>> have to write "orb." in front of every method. Note the following syntax
>> is not possible in Ruby:
>>
>> ver = "1.0.0"
>> author = "Jacob Carlborg"
>> type = Type.library
>> imports = ["a.d", "b.di"]
>>
>> The above syntax is what I would prefer but it doesn't work in Ruby, would
>> create local variables and not call instance methods. Because of that I
>> chose the syntax I chose, the least verbose syntax I could think of.
>>
>
> That syntax should be doable in D.
>
>
>>>> DSSS forced an INI-similar syntax on people.
>>>>
>>>
>>> INI-syntax is trivial. Especially compared to Ruby (or D for that matter,
>>> to
>>> be perfectly fair).
>>
>> I was thinking that the Ruby syntax was as easy and trivial as the
>> INI-syntax if you just use the basic, like I have in the examples. No need
>> to use if-statements, loops or classes. That's just for packages that need
>> to do very special things.
>>
>
> But then the people who do such fancy things have to do it in Ruby instead
> of D.
>
>> To take the DSSS syntax again as an example:
>>
>> # legal syntax
>> version (Windows) {
>> }
>>
>> # illegal syntax
>> version (Windows)
>> {
>> )
>>
>> I assume this is because the lexer/parser is very simple. You don't have
>> this problem if you use a complete language for the config/spec files.
>>
>
> Right. And D is a complete language.
>
>>>
>>> 1. The amount of extra stuff is fairly minimal. *Especially* in the
>>> majority
>>> of cases where the user uses the standard name ("orbconf.d" or whatever
>>> you
>>> want to call it).
>>
>> OK, I guess you can get away without the IO, but you still need the extra
>> processes.
>>
>
> That should be pretty quick.

Ok, for now I will continue with Ruby and see how it goes. One thing I 
do think looks really ugly in D are delegates. For the Dake config file, 
I'm thinking that it would allow several targets and tasks (like rake), 
which would looks something like this (in Ruby):

target "name" do |t|
     t.flags = "-L-lz"
end

In D this would look something like this:

target("name", (Target t) {
     t.flags = "-L-lz"
});

Or with operator overload abuse:

target("name") in (Target t) {
     t.flags = "-L-lz"
};

I would so love if this syntax (that's been suggested before) was supported:

target("name", Target t) {
     t.flags = "-L-lz"
}

If anyone have better ideas for how this can be done I'm listening.

One other thing, syntax below can be thought of like a compile time eval:

void main ()
{
     mixin(import("file.d"));
}

Does anyone have an idea if it would be possible to do the corresponding 
to instance eval that is available in some scripting languages?

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg